Wednesday, May 04, 2005

TM™ers Live Longer, Or Omit Better

File under: The Siddhi of PR

The minions of the Maharishi in Fairfield are at it again. Always trying to stuff their "research" into popular publications, they've managed to get an article in Britain's Guardian Unlimited about the publication of their research results in the American Journal of Cardiology.

The study followed elderly subjects over the span of 18 years who employed different relaxation techniques, including TM™—which proved to be the show-stopper of the lot: "The transcendental meditation group had 30% fewer deaths from heart disease and 49% fewer from cancer."

That's quite the endorsement for TM™. And it's also very convenient for the leader of the research, Dr. Robert Schneider, head of the "centre of natural medicine and prevention at the Maharishi University of Management"—who just happens to be selling TM™ himself.

And the research seems to omit any mention of any other kind of meditation technique. They don't seem to want to concede that any form of mantra meditation would probably work as well, along with most other techniques including vipassana, zen, contemplative prayer and just about anything else that involved periods of quiet in some sort of mental concentration practice.

But they can't charge you for those. And if you're trying to become the Kleenex of meditation practices, you need to be the only brand people think of. It worked for Kleenex because they were the first. The only way it can work for TM™ now is to take over the entire meditation industry. We hear there are Age of Enlightenment compounds tucked deep into abandoned missile silos in the corn fields of Iowa... waiting to be activated at the dawn of the New Age™, ready to make the Maharishi the new "Man"...

"The Report of Germany's Institute for Youth and Society on TM"For the first time on the Web, TranceNet presents the entire text of this seminal report in English translation -- with charts. The TM movement attempted to suppress this report in German courts, but its findings were upheld by the German high court (The Federal Republic of Germany: OVG Muenster: 5 A 1152/84, The Bundesverwaltungsgericht: 23.5.87 7 C 2.87, The Bundesverfassungsgericht: 1 BvR 881/89). Among the subjects studied:

.... An appropriate name for your blog could have been Neti Neti.— Rama

While we understand that gurus are held sacred by many, they
are also public figures deserving of scrutiny. Our primary aim
is to inject a little humor into what can be an excessively
self-righteous enterprise, and to illustrate the primary truth that
no matter how divine their devotees believe them to be, gurus
poop on the same pot we do.